Teaching Reading to a Non-Verbal Child with Autism

A Pilot Study

Yoga B. Santoso

1,2

, Syihabuddin Syihabuddin

, Djadja Rahardja

, Ernie C. Siregar

, H. Herlina

Riskma N. R. Akhlan

, Rahmatrisilvia Rahmatrisilvia

, Arief Taboer

, Ranti Novianti

1,2

and A.

Rahim Kurniawan

Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Jl. Setiabudhi No. 299, Bandung, Indonesia

Special Education, Universitas Islam Nusantara, Jl. Sukarno-Hatta No. 530, Bandung, Indonesia

yogabudhisantoso@student.upi.edu

Keywords: Non-verbal Autism, Sight words reading, Teaching reading.

Abstract: The conventional thinking believes that children should learn how to speak before they can read. In fact, about

20-50% of autistic children cannot speak. This pilot study aimed to teach reading to a non-verbal child with

autism by utilizing of his readily available visual memory skills. This is an experimental study of a non-verbal

child with autism. The child was taught how to read through a sight word reading approach using a picture-

to-text matching instruction for two hours in a day in 30 days. This study revealed that the child managed to

understand 30 written words to which he was taught. This shows that a non-verbal child with autism can still

read regardless of his inability to speak. Sight word reading approach enables a non-verbal child with autism

to learn to read because it does not require a decoding ability. It is expected that a further study can be carried

out with more subjects so as to figure out the effectiveness of the application of sight word reading approach

to teaching reading to non-verbal children with autism.

1 INTRODUCTION

Reading is one of the crucial functional skills at a

child’s early stage of learning (Crowley et al., 2013;

Moore and Sudduth, 2014; Calberry, 2014).

According to Zascavage and Kefee (2004), reading is

one of the bases for social interaction and can

guarantee one’s quality of life. Therefore, learning

how to read is very crucial for children, including

those with non-verbal autism. In this respect, Hua et

al (2012) stated that reading is one of critical learning

objectives for all students regardless of how severe

their disabilities are.

Gough and Tunmer theory says reading ability is

dependent on two skills: decoding (the ability to read

words) and language comprehension (Oakhill et al.,

2015; Ricketts et al., 2012). Children who have issues

with language, speech, and communication have a

high probability to fail to able to read (Heller et al.,

2002; Nation et al., 2006; Flores and Ganz, 2009;

Larsson et al., 2009), while characteristics of autistic

children is having linguistic and communication

difficulties. Norbury and Nation (2011) note that

approximately 20% of children with autism failed to

acquire spoken language, speech fluency, and

language syntax. Whitman (2000), says about 50% of

autistic children are not equipped with the ability to

speak. Unquestionably, the low speaking ability

becomes a great barrier for children with autism (even

some of them cannot speak) unable to read.

Bijl et al. (2004) write children with moderate and

severe mental disability can learn reading through

sight word. It is memorizing as a whole by sight so

that they can automatically recognize words in print

without having to use any strategies to decode. Ehri

(2005) explain that sight word reading is reading

using memory. He further explains that the

development of reading skill requires the

accumulation of words that are abundantly stored in

the sight word memory. Browder and Xin’s (1998)

meta-analytic study on the effectiveness of sight word

in teaching functional reading to children with

moderate and severe disability revealed that 48

studies that were examined reported high

effectiveness of sight word. Crowley, Laughlin, and

Kahn (2013) have also investigated the application of

sight word to teaching reading to two children with

autism, and the result was very positive. However,

their study did not specifically address the non-verbal

Santoso, Y., Syihabuddin, S., Rahardja, D., Siregar, E., Herlina, H., Akhlan, R., Rahmatrisilvia, R., Taboer, A., Novianti, R. and Kurniawan, A.

Teaching Reading to a Non-Verbal Child with Autism - A Pilot Study.

In 1st International Conference on Educational Sciences (ICES 2017), pages 1039-1042

ISBN: 978-989-758-314-8

1039

autistic children. Based on research and studies on

sight word reading requires only memory and no

decoding capabilities required, it is possible for non-

verbal autism children to keep reading even if they

cannot talk. According to the research and study of

sight word that only used working memories and not

used decoding ability, this means children with

nonverbal autism still ca read even they cannot talk.

This study was aimed at teaching reading to a non-

verbal child with autism through a sight word reading

approach in a structured learning instruction

considering that an autistic child has a good visual

memory (Matson and Peter, 2011) and that structured

learning has been proven effective in teaching

children with autism.

2 METHODS

Experiment study were used in this research are

Single-Subject Experiment with A/B Design, with

participants selected directly or Quasi Experiment

(Creswell, 2008). The ability of reading will be tested

before and after intervention

The subject of this pilot study was a non-verbal

autistic male child aged 6 years 10 months at one of

therapy centers in Bandung. He was diagnosed with

autism at age 2 years 8 months by a child

development specialist. The result of the WPPSI test

showed that his score of Full IQ was 61, Performance

IQ 84, and Verbal IQ 47, unable to speak and

communicate verbally, skilled in matching objects

with the identical images and matching letters. In this

study. The subject taught by 2 teachers, learned for

two hours in a day, five days a week, in a month,

conducted over 30 sessions. He learns a

predetermined special individualized program at the

centers.

The teaching approach selected in this study was

sight word reading using a picture-to-text matching

instruction that was employed by Fossett and Mirenda

(2005). The instruction used the Discrete Trial

Training (DTT) principles; that is, a method for

teaching new skills by giving specific stimulus and

consequences for every resulted response, either the

correct or the wrong response, or even for when the

child did not give any response (Matson, and

Sturmey, 2011). Nouns and verbs are the bases for

every language system (Goh et al., 2013).

The words that were taught in the lesson were

include names of children, parents, and siblings and

the names of objects, animals, and fruits, also daily

routine verbs. The words were classified into five

groups called blocks. Thus there were six blocks of

the words taught to the child. The words are taught

one by one.

Research conducted to obtain preliminary data on

phase I called Baseline, in this phase: The child was

instructed to match word cards with the related

pictures of nouns or verbs being taught in each block.

Correct responses were calculated and stated in

percentage. The data were collected from three

different sessions.

Intervention on phase II: The child was instructed

to match words with the related pictures of nouns and

verbs one by one using Discrete Trial Teaching

(DTT) technique, and every response was recorded.

The child was said to acquire all words if he could

match the five words in each block with the relevant

pictures even if they were randomized. The child was

said to pass if his responses are all correct in the three

sessions in a consecutive manner.

3 RESULTS

At the baseline phase I the child were given 5 words

to be match into picture-to-text matching with all the

blocks were given. The result of the reading teaching

can be seen in Figure 1. In the three meetings

(session) in the baseline phase, the child did not

manage to give correct response (0%) to the blocks of

pictures of family members, surrounding objects,

animals and verbs in Block I. However, he managed

to match one out of five pictures (20%) in the fruit

block and verbs in verbs in Block II in the third

session in the baseline phase. After intervention on

phase II, the child capable to put five words match

with the picture text matching. The capability of

reading was shown by correctly put the picture to text

matching at a different intervention session.

Child can read the word of verb at block II in

Session 18, in the fruit block in Session 21,

surrounding object block in Session 24, in the family

member and in the animal block in Session 27, and

verbs in Block I in Session 30. The total words

acquired by the child from 30 sessions of learning

were 30 words (20 nouns and 10 verbs).

ICES 2017 - 1st International Conference on Educational Sciences

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Figure 1: Percentage of correct responses to every word block in each session.

4 DISCUSSION

The results of the study showed that a non-verbal

child with autism could still possibly be taught how

to read. This was indicated by his ability to match

words with the relevant words. The result is also in

agreement with a report of the previous study that

three out of five children participating in the study

showed significant improvement in their reading

ability, and the other two show no to little

improvement (Goh et al., 2013). Results of

intervention of children able to read seen from the

ability of children to pair the word card on the picture

card, compared with the use of flash cards in reading

sight word in children autism verbal (Crowley,

McLaughlin and Kahn 2012), research with sight

word reading also gives 100% results for non-verbal

autism children in reading ability and in this study the

number of words taught and controlled by more

children, 30 word cards from 30 words taught.

This study; however, cannot be generalized since

it was specifically design for only one child. The

further study is expected to involve more participants

so as to figure out which child can improve his

reading ability and which is not. That said, the

determinant factors could then be analyzed.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The results of the study showed that the child

managed to understand the written form of the words

to which he was taught. He managed to correctly

match the words to the relevant pictures even when

they were randomly arranged. A significant

improvement can be seen if the result of the baseline

is compared with that of the intervention. This

indicates that sight word reading approach can

improve the reading ability of a non-verbal child with

autism participating in this study because it does not

require decoding skill.

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